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The Letters of Adam Marsh and the Franciscan School at Oxford

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

C. H. Lawrence
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Salimbene called the Franciscan Adam Marsh ‘one of the greatest clerks of the world’, an accolade he reserved for a small group of men whom he regarded as the master minds of his time. A glance at Adam's letters suggests that Salimbene's opinion was widely shared by Adam's contemporaries. Few men without official position can have had their advice so eagerly sought by so many different people in high places. He was the counsellor of Henry III and the queen, the confidant of Simon de Montfort and his wife, the mentor of bishops and consultant to the rulers of his order. He enjoyed the trust of men as different as Archbishop Boniface of Savoy, who tried to recruit him to his familia, and Grosseteste, a lifelong friend, with whom he collaborated in the study and transmission of Greek texts. He moved with equal assurance in the world of ecclesiastical politics and the scholastic world of the university. The nature of his political influence has been the subject of frequent surmise, but the importance of his part in directing the Franciscan school at Oxford and creating the scholastic organisation of the English province has long been recognised. Yet several phases of his career and life remain obscure or at best enigmatic. My object here is to elucidate some of the more opaque points of his career and to re-examine his place in the history of the early Franciscan school.

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Articles
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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , April 1991 , pp. 218 - 238
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

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19 According to Eccleston, he was persuaded to enter the order by Adam of Exeter, who left England by the end of 1232 to preach to the Saracens: Tractatus de Adventu Fralrum Minorum in Angliam, ed. A. G., Little, Manchester 1951, 17–18Google Scholar.

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22 Chronicon de Lanercost, ed. J., Stevenson, Edinburgh 1839, 58Google Scholar. He is listed as rector of Wearmouth in the Liber Vitae of Durham, see following note. In the assessment of 1291 the rectory was valued at £100Google Scholar; it was the second richest in the diocese: Taxatio Ecclesiestica Papae Nicholai IV, 1802, 314Google Scholar.

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95 Cf. n. 81 above.Google Scholar

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